everybody is in the class.

Time to advertise students' blogs again...

Sandro                       Daniel                    Kamila               
Cagalay                      Martin                   Hammou

I actually made a lovely big blog entry all about this yesterday, but then I forgot to save and publish it, so when I tried to open it today, I was very disappointed!!!  I don't have time to do it again now :(

Another group of students have made blogs.  Here are links to them:

Elif             Manabu                Manami              David                  Yuri

Matheu               Emma               Yaneth              Shin

Aysel... I couldn't find your blog!  What was the address?

Could you be a teacher?

This week's project is each small group of students to teach a half-hour slot on Friday.  They have chosen their own topics, including: situational language (at the post office, restaurant, bank, etc), phrasal verbs, and colloquial language (at the pub, etc).

I'll be looking forward to putting my feet up for a couple of hours on Friday, and also to seeing how they approach the challenge of making interesting classes.

Here are some tips for Friday, and about teaching in general:

• Repetitititition - this is one of the most fundamental ways that children learn language.  They sing the same nursery rhymes again and again (and again).  However, it is not so easy to convince/coerce/force adults to do this, and it is very difficult to think of ways to make repetition fun.  One hint is to sneak the repetition into your own language, so if you want to teach them phrasal verbs, ask "what did you get up to yesterday?" every day.  Another useful technique is to create a list of questions that force the students to use the target grammar/vocabulary when they are answering, and then have them talk to each other about these.  My personal favourite is to use songs, because if they end up singing along to themselves when they are on the bus, they will automatically remember very good examples of important language.

• Interaction - our brains have to sort through a lot of useless information every day (the colour of the bus seat, what the person sitting next to you is reading, etc).  But, when something is really important, it has to remember it.  One way to show your brain that what you are studying is important is to use it in conversation with other people. When you do this, your brain realises that the thing you are trying to learn is something useful, so you will remember it much faster than if you just repeat it or do exercises.

• Closed & open practice - start by presenting the language you want the students to learn, then have some closed practice, which is something like a matching or gap-fill exercise.  This allows the students to get some experience with the language in a safe way.  Next, give them a situation that allows them to use the language in their own dialogues.  This is open practice because the way they use the language is up to them.

Here are some more general tips that I've picked up along the way:

• Use background music during conversational/interactive tasks.  This makes students feel less shy about speaking to one another because they can't be heard by the others so easily.  It also creates a more relaxed atmosphere, and makes it easier to shut people up at the end because they know that when the music stops, the task has finished!
• Get students to choose who goes next.  It forces them to learn the names of everyone in the class, and this creates a much more friendly and social vibe. 
• Distribute girls evenly around the classroom.  Girls are more sociable than guys.  When guys sit together, they often don't interact at all.  Put a girl amongst the guys and it often solves this problem.

Students' Book Reviews

This week's project... to write a book review. 

Here are the links to the pages of the students who have done it:


Julia          Bejansu          Hosung          Laureen          Minji   

Jet             Chloe              Veronika  

Book Review - On Intelligence

This week's class assignment is to read a book and write a critical review of it, so here is mine.



←　This is the book I'm reading at the moment.

It is a science book written by Jeff Hawkins, a theoretical neuroscientist who first worked in Silicon Valley developing personal computing software and hardware, then later returned to his first love - neuroscience - to seek answers to the question of how that lump of matter in our heads determines who we are.

Since I am a cognitive scientist with particular interest in theoretical neuroscience, this book is especially relevant to me.  However, I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding the details of how the brain works at at the neuronal level.

Hawkins opens by explaining how in his early years he came to work for a number of computing companies because he had been unable to find any place where he could pursue theoretical neuroscience.  There were people studying neuroscience, but he thought they were too focussed on the cells rather than the functions that they perform (cognition, intelligence, etc), and there were computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers, but they were too focussed on the functions without paying any attention to how these functions could be occurring in an animal (via neurons).  Because there was no field of study that suited him, he applied for a job and ended up designing several pieces of pattern recognition software that were very popular and made his name.

With this under his belt, he went back to study neuroscience and eventually founded his own non-profit research facility, now called the Redwood Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, where he continued to develop the theory of neocortex information processing that he has laid out in this book.  He now has his own company that aims to implement his theories of the neocortex in useful artificial intelligence applications - Numenta.

The theoretical part of the book starts by explaining why he believes the neocortex to be the seat of intelligence.  As far as our nervous systems are concerned, it is the cortex that differentiates us (the mammals) from the other animals (lizards, birds, fish, amphibians, insects...).  Animals with and without a neocortex are much the same in terms of their repertoire of motor behaviours; they run, jump, bite, chew, swim, etc.  However, Hawkins argues that it is not this kind of behaviour that exemplifies intelligence, but rather the more abstract and unobservable behaviours, like remembering the layout of the environment, planning actions that may not receive a reward for some time, or developing complex social relationships (not to mention language).  The neocortex does this by discovering patterns in the things that we experience, and sequences in these patterns, and then by using these sequences of patterns to make predictions about what we will experience.

The most fascinating part of the book is the middle few chapters, in which Hawkins goes into detail about how the pattern and sequence detecting could occur in the columns that make up our cortex.  It all comes down to hierarchies.  The environment is sensed by our eyes, ears, etc, and simple patterns are detected by low levels of the hierarchy (early processing in the cortex).  Then the next level of the cortical hierarchy looks at these and finds more complex patterns, and then the next layer does the same to find even more complex patterns.

Above you can see how one of these hierarchies could be understood in terms of function, while to the right you can see how neocortical columns can implement these hierarchies.

I actually read about this book a few years ago and wanted to get my hands on a copy at the time.  I am glad that I didn't though, because I have recently been doing a lot of research into hierarchical processing and learning in different parts of the brain (cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum), and reading this book at this time in particular has provided answers to many questions that I have only just started asking, as well as guiding me towards many more questions that I would like to find the answers to from now.

Right now I'm sitting in the classroom trying to motivate my students to write the second instalment of their blogs and thinking about MOTIVATION...

It seems that none of them is really wanting to write their blog, and one or two are looking like I'm asking them throw a baby out of the window!  But when we started this project on Monday and followed it up over the next two days, they all quite enjoyed it.

However, it does take effort, and I think this is where the problem lies.
Though everyone wants to learn English and has demonstrated their motivation by travelling all the way to England at no small expense to themselves or their family, when it comes to putting a certain type of effort into a task, the motivation fizzles.

What is this 'certain type of effort'?

I've noticed a big difference between motivation to do closed tasks and motivation to do open tasks.

By closed tasks, I mean small, simple, easily achievable tasks such as choosing the correct word to go in a space in the text, choosing which category something goes into, matching the things on the left with the things on the right, etc.  In English as a second language learning, these kinds of tasks abound.  They are quick to complete, easy to understand and can be easily found or created for any grammar point of vocabulary exercise.

An open task, on the other hand, is one where the learners have to generate everything themselves.  For example, creating a role-play, practising, and performing it in front of the class.  There is a lot more freedom involved in this kind of exercise since you must create a story, make it interesting, consider the kind of language you will use, if it is correctly constructed, if the vocabulary is appropriate, if you are interacting suitably, and then do the performance at the end.



These two kinds of task are approached very differently by students, whether they be a highly self-motivated group of adult learners or a bunch of teenagers more interested in chatting with their peers than learning anything.  When you put a sheet of writing with some gaps in in front of someone, they have a very well-defined task to do which can be marked at the end for an immediate assessment of performance.  People dive into this kind of task.  A few weeks ago I had a class of Italian teenagers who were mostly out of control, but if I gave them a gap-fill exercise, they would knuckle down for about 10 minutes of frantic concentration.  Which was great!!  The problem was that the task is so narrow and short lived that it required very little imagination and engagement.  You have to give very little of yourself to a gap-fill - it's all already there on the paper.

I got to thinking about this seriously a few years ago when one of my students who had become a good friend started at university.  While studying English at my school he had worked hard and done many exercises as well as being very sociable and using English with lots of different friends.  However, when he started at university his English ability suddenly soared.  The reason for this was that he was being given projects to complete which required him to research thoroughly before compiling the information he had gathered into his own piece of writing or presentation.  This required a great deal of continuous and focussed effort - he had to immerse himself in the task, often for over a week.  He was experiencing new vocabulary that he had to remember in order to understand what he was reading and hearing, and which he would use in his work.  The grammar that he had studied before but never had much chance to use was required in order to express complex ideas (it is predicted that sales will have exceeded 1 million units by January).

While closed tasks do require effort, and students may spend hours and hours at home doing task after task, it is a lazy effort!  But this desire to put in effort in the easiest way possible is not just a problem for students.  I know that I do it too, in all areas of my life.  It all boils down to the path of least resistance.  Imagine you decide to go hiking in some mountains, like the ones shown in this picture.  You want to get from one side of the mountains to the other - do you go over the peak of one of the mountains, or do you go through the valley between the two?  Of course, the valley.  You have decided to go walking in the mountains, but you plan the route to be as easy as possible.  (It may be that your plan is to go to the top of the mountain, but even in this case, you would plan the easiest route that got you to the top). This is all well and good; it would be stupid to plan to use the most difficult route!  But what about if your goal is to improve your hill climbing skill and power?  In that case, selecting the path of least resistance is not the most beneficial strategy.  This is a lot like studying English - it's not so much about the time you put in, or even the effort, but the kind of effort.  It should be via tasks that challenge you to encounter and generate as much (new) language as possible.

To this end, I've recently been trying to set my students weekly projects to complete, from presentations to story writing to creating a blog about something they are interested in.  I'm finishing writing this in the cafe near my house now.  I asked them to finish writing their blogs for homework this evening... we'll see tomorrow whether they have done it!